The Useful Idiot’s Useful Idiot
Donald J. Trump has long denied being Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot. The credibility of that claim took a major hit on “Liberation Day,” when he spared Russia from tariffs while slapping them on virtually every other place on Earth, including an island near Antarctica inhabited only by penguins.
But Trump has too much on his plate right now to give useful idiocy the attention it deserves. Between destroying the global economy, threatening to invade Greenland and Canada, and issuing an executive order demanding higher water pressure from America’s shower heads, there’s precious little time to kiss Putin’s KGB ass. Solution? The useful idiot is outsourcing the task to a deputy useful idiot.
Meet Steve Witkoff.
Like most members of Trump’s governing junta, real estate wheeler-dealer Witkoff is a billionaire, though not an especially towering one: with a net worth of a mere $2 billion, he clocks in at 1,763rd place on Forbes’s list of the world’s richest. Despite that lowly status, he has become Trump’s diplomat of first resort, parachuting into the world’s hottest hotspots without demonstrating that he could locate any of them on a map.
How did someone with zero diplomatic experience become MAGA’s Kissinger? Easy: by playing golf with Trump, and presumably by letting him win (or at least pretending not to notice when he cheated).
Witkoff has risen in the Trump administration as swiftly as measles cases in Texas. First, Trump dispatched him to the Middle East, perhaps reasoning that a novice diplomat should start in a region where countries have a long history of getting along superbly.
How has that peacemaking gone so far? Well, let’s just say that Trump won’t be breaking ground on the Mar-a-Gaza Beach Club any time soon. But he was apparently so happy with Witkoff’s rookie performance that he added another crisis to his portfolio: Ukraine. With Witkoff now running America’s foreign policy, Secretary of State Little Marco will be lucky to be included in the next Signal chat with Jeff Goldberg.
In Ukraine, Witkoff’s gifts as a useful idiot have been on magnificent display. On March 21 he appeared on the podcast of former Fox News host-slash-fellow useful idiot Tucker Carlson, where he announced that he “liked” the president of the Russian Federation. "I don't regard Putin as a bad guy," he astutely observed.
Elsewhere on the podcast, he exhibited a shaky grasp of Ukrainian geography but a near-total mastery of Russian talking points. Struggling to list the four Ukrainian regions demanded by Russia as part of any peace settlement—Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk—Witkoff could only emit, "these so-called four regions, Donbas, Crimea." Carlson helpfully pitched in with Luhansk, using the Russian pronunciation—which, naturally, Tucker prefers—“Lugansk.” Witkoff dutifully repeated after him, before adding, confusingly, “and there’s two others.”
I repeat: this is Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine.
After three weeks of marinating in Russian propaganda, including a four-and-a-half hour meeting with Putin in St. Petersburg last Friday, Witkoff is now reportedly aware of what those four regions are called—and wants to gift them all to the Russian dictator, as a reward for his illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Trump’s golf pal has swallowed the standard Kremlin line that the people of those regions voted to become Russian citizens—ignoring the fact that those votes were cast in sham referenda, often at gunpoint.
The result of Witkoff’s crackerjack diplomacy? Only two days after the St. Petersburg meeting, the man he deemed not a bad guy felt sufficiently emboldened to order a ballistic missile attack on a Palm Sunday gathering in Ukraine, killing 34 civilians, including women and children.
This atrocity received global condemnation, but Witkoff remained conspicuously silent. Perhaps he had bigger things on his mind: based on his string of diplomatic triumphs, Trump has just named him special envoy to Iran, where he will head up negotiations over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. What could go wrong?
TBR Question of the Day: What other special envoys should Trump appoint?
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I apologize to everyone for bringing this clown to your attention. But this is the Home of Truth.
Pete Hegseth couldn't come up with the name of even one member of the Southeast Asian Alliance when asked. If you asked Witkoff the 2 countries that fought in the American Civil War the strain of coming up with an answer might cause a neurological event.